This essay uses court records to trace the federal government's attempts to regulate homosexuality among immigrants in the mid-twentieth century, asserting that such attempts illustrate the state's struggle to make homosexuality visible, to produce a homosexuality that could be both detected and managed. I focus on the process by which two competing paradigms for understanding homosexuality (status and conduct) were consolidated into a single model in which homosexual identity could be deduced from homosexual acts. Federal officials and the courts initially treated homosexuality as a form of conduct, most commonly deporting homosexual aliens for having committed crimes of moral turpitude. Later, these same government entities relied on status provisions, deporting immigrants charged with homosexuality as aliens “afflicted with psychopathic personality.” While the “psychopathic personality” terminology supported the notion that the homosexual was a kind of person rather than a set of behaviors, it also depended upon psychiatrists to support the claim that homosexuals were by definition psychopathic. When many psychiatrists distanced themselves from that idea, the government refused psychiatric opinion that differentiated psychopaths from homosexuals by arguing that these terms connoted legal-political rather than medicalized identity categories. While this conception arose out of a conservative impulse by immigration officials and the courts to fix homosexuality as identity so that it could be regulated (by bureaucrats rather than psychiatrists), I argue that the emphasis on legal-political identity categories licensed a conception of the homosexual as a kind of citizen that had some emancipatory as well as repressive effects.

Transsexual and transgendered people, despite their exclusion from most civil rights laws, nonetheless occasionally prevail as plaintiffs in litigation. What should feminist legal theorists make of these victories? The theory one uses to win has implications for future conceptions of gender and sexuality in the law as well as for understanding contemporary conflicts and alliances among sex and gender theorists, lawyers, and activists. Conflicting theories of how to ground law's liberation claims abound, however. Evidence suggests that transsexuals secure legal victories only through a disheartening process of medicalization, normalization, and demonstration of traditional sex and gender role adherence. Recent cases, however, reveal some interesting destabilizations in law's account of the transsexual, and they provide critical legal scholars with a new perspective on rights-claiming as a liberation strategy. Attention to the diversity of transsexual and transgendered priorities as well as to the properties of the legal process shows feminist legal theorists how to navigate the problems of identity construction and legal protection raised here sympathetically but unromantically.

This study seeks to explain the paradoxical expansion of constitutional power in Egypt over the past two decades, despite that country's authoritarian political system. I find that the Egyptian regime established an independent constitutional court, capable of providing institutional guarantees on the security of property rights, in order to attract desperately needed private investment after the failure of its socialist-oriented development strategy. The court continued to expand its authority, fundamentally transforming the mode of interaction between state and society by supporting regime efforts to liberalize the economy while simultaneously providing new avenues for opposition activists and human rights groups to challenge the state. The Egyptian case challenges some of our basic assumptions about the conditions under which we are likely to see a judicialization of politics, and it invites scholars to explore the dynamics of judicial politics in other authoritarian political systems.

This paper examines the legal consciousness of same-sex couples with respect to marriage. Data from an interview-based study of 71 members of same-sex couples reveal strong consensus on the desirability of having samesex relationships legally recognized, and considerable variation in couples’ attempts to enact marriage culturally through various practices, including the use of marriage-related terminology and public commitment rituals. I argue that some of these efforts to enact marriage culturally should also be read as attempts to enact legality in the absence of official law. The findings from this study challenge the idea that marginalized social actors will tend toward a resistant legal consciousness: Rather than seeking to avoid and evade legality in their everyday lives, most same-sex couples seem to embrace legality for its practical and symbolic resources, even as they stand “against the law” in their opposition to the exclusion of same-sex couples from the institution of legal marriage. Approaching marriage from the perspective of same-sex couples, this research demonstrates that the legal and cultural aspects of marriage are deeply intertwined. Cultural enactments of marriage enact legality even in the absence of official law, and many actors ascribe to law a cultural power that transcends its specific benefits and protections, the power to produce social and cultural equality.

The end of the millennium has witnessed an enormous expansion in discourses, intervention practices, and social movements opposing violence against women. Not only does this development affect familial and gender inequalities, but it also reshapes the relationships among communities, states, and the global order. This symposium examines these changing relationships by considering how new discourses, laws, and practices about gender violence between intimates develop through local, national, and global processes. It explores local situations from a global perspective and global processes from a local perspective. Thus, it examines the local-global interface in the creation and implementation of social reforms concerning violence against women. We use the case of violence against women because it offers an excellent vantage point for analyzing the creation of an emerging global system of law based in human rights and assessing its impact on local and national laws and practices. It also offers a site to examine how local actors reformulate the content and meaning of global reform discourses. The articles track actors from local to international settings and back again as they negotiate the application of law to violence against women.

In this article I offer a principled strategy for the courts to identify and to handle the uses of culture as a defense in a criminal proceeding. I begin by discussing the relationship between culture and behavior illuminated by sociologists of culture. I then explain the three categories into which cultural defenses fall–cultural reason, cultural requirement, and cultural tolerance–and the response of criminal courts in the United States to each. I argue that where culture offers an alternative explanation of the defendant's intent, it is highly relevant to determinations of criminal liability. However, where a defendant uses culture only to explain why he wanted to harm the victim and asks that the court be tolerant of such behavior, considerations of culture should not be allowed. In reaching this conclusion, I draw on theories of multiculturalism to consider the benefits and burdens of maintaining the facade of a “cultureless” criminal law in an increasingly heterogeneous society.

Lustration laws, which discharge the influence of old power structures upon entering democracies, are considered the most controversial measure of transitional justice. This article suggests that initial examinations of lustrations have often overlooked the tremendous challenges faced by new democracies. It identifies the motives behind the approval of two distinctive lustration laws in the Czech Republic and Poland, examines their capacity to meet their objectives, and determines the factors that influence their performance. The comparison of the Czech semi-renibutive model with the Polish semi-reconciliatory model suggests the relative success of the fonner within a few years following its approval. It concludes that a certain lustration model might be significant for democratic consolidation in other transitional countries.

This paper examines the frames that women use to understand their experience with sexual harassment. While legal frames do provide crucial guidance to women evaluating the behavior of their colleagues and supervisors, working women deployed a number of other interpretive frames when deciding whether they had been harmed by such behavior. Some of those frames emerge from feminist messages about discrimination and male abuse of power in the workplace; some emerge from management ideology that emphasizes efficiency and productivity; and some emerge from the criticism of sexual harassment policies as an unnecessary limitation on women's sexual freedom. But feeling a sense of harm does not automatically translate into the use of the label sexual harassment. Rather, women also employed an objective standard that compared their experience to some threshold of harassing behaviors. Only when the behaviors met this standard of offensiveness and were perceived as harmful did women consider their experiences sexual harassment.

Jurors are laypersons with no specific expert knowledge, yet they are routinely placed in situations in which they need to critically evaluate complex expert testimony. This paper examines jurors' reactions to experts who testify in civil trials and the factors jurors identify as important to expert credibility. Based on in-depth qualitative analyses of interviews with 55 jurors in 7 civil trials, we develop a comprehensive model of the key factors jurors incorporate into the process of evaluating expert witnesses and their testimony. Contrary to the frequent criticism that jurors primarily evaluate expert evidence in terms of its subjective characteristics, the results of our study indicate that jurors consider both the messenger and the message in the course of evaluating the expert's credibility.

A long-standing scholarly tradition regards professions, in general, and ethics rules, in particular, as “projects” of market control. It is no surprise, critics charge, that in the latest assault on the monopoly of the American legal profession–waged by multidisciplinary professional service firms–lawyers are hiding behind their ethics rules to protect their turf.

In this article, I report on an extensive empirical study of conflict of interest in private legal practice and look comparatively at other fiduciaries, among them, accountants, psychotherapists, physicians, journalists, and academics. I investigate the role of ethics rules that seek to insure fiduciary loyalty in structuring the delivery of services. How does social and institutional change, roiling the fiduciary world, threaten disinterestedness and loyalty and how, if at all, do fiduciaries respond? How is the regulation of conflict of interest accomplished? Where are the conflicts rules most likely to be honored or ignored? What incentive structures encourage compliance? What are the costs and unexpected consequences of compliance? What is foregone? And is it all worth it?

In what might come as a surprise to many, I find that the legal profession takes conflict of interest more seriously than many of the rest of us. As the title implies, legal practitioners largely travel alone, bushwhacking through the underbrush snarling the ethical high road. As critical scholarship predicted, lawyers do enjoy a monopoly at the end of the road. But this monopoly is achieved, not by restraint of trade or some other artifice or stratagem of market control, but by lack of competition. It seems that no one else is trudging alongside the lawyers. Lawyers are not necessarily more ethical than the others; they just behave more ethically–at least with respect to conflict of interest. The question is why. And what difference does it make?

This ethnographic analysis of one of the core human rights conventions suggests that despite the lack of enforceability of this convention and its operation within the framework of state sovereignty, it is similar to state law. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, or CEDAW, the major UN convention on the status of women, articulates a vision of women's equal protection from discrimination and addresses gender-based violence as a form of discrimination. It had been ratified by 171 nation states as of mid-2003. Its implementation relies on a complex process of periodic reporting to a global body meeting in New York and a symbiotic if sometimes contentious relationship between government representatives and international and domestic NGOs. Like state law, it serves to articulate and name problems and delineate solutions. It provides a resource for activists endeavoring to address problems of women's status and turns the international gaze on resisting nations. Its regulatory strength depends on the cultural legitimacy of the international process of consensus building and related social movements to define social justice in these terms. Thus, like state law, its impact depends on its cultural legitimacy and its embodiment in local cultures and legal consciousness. This examination of CEDAW as quasi law extends our understanding of law as a plural and a symbolic system rooted in a particular historical moment of globalization.

This article examines how workers perceive the laws and rules that regulate their workplaces and how these perceptions differ depending on whether one works in an organization with a high level of worker-manager cooperation versus one with a more conventional hierarchy. Using two cab companies as examples, this article explores how these divergent organizational structures generate different grievance cultures that in turn encourage alternate understanding of available choices and appropriate means for resolving such disputes.

This work expands the current sociolegal literature on legal consciousness by focusing on formal and informal workplace grievance resolution and perceptions of workplace conflict. In exploring the critical decision making regarding grievance resolution, this article begins an important discussion about workplace empowerment and legal consciousness. This study uses qualitative methods to examine 33 open-ended interviews. The use of qualitative methods permits a vibrant dialog that illustrates the legal consciousness of the subjects, The subjects' own words reveal their comprehension of rules, regulations, and procedures as well as their individual relationships with the grievance-resolution options in their workplaces.

This paper investigates one example of a process with global implications that I describe as the “regendering” of the state. Regendering refers to the process of bringing to public and legal attention categories and activities that were formerly without name but that constituted harm to women, denied them rights, silenced them, or limited their capacity to engage in actions available to men. I examine the regendering of the Trinidadian state by focusing on one of its most salient examples, the Domestic Violence Act. I identify first the coalition of forces and events that brought the subject of violence against women to lawmakers' attention and made possible the first Domestic Violence Act in the English-speaking Caribbean. I then investigate the interplay between the global discourse about domestic violence law—the passage of which has become an important symbol of the “modern” state—and local concerns about justice, gender, and family. Finally, I consider problems in the implementation of domestic violence law.

Trust is essential to successful business relations, particularly to the efficient operation of law firms. Trust fosters productive working relationships, favorable reputations, and a lucrative clientele. This paper contributes to research on law firm development through a consideration of social dynamics within law firms beyond traditional emphases on trading relationships and community solidarity. We introduce a social capital perspective on the evolution of trust and its consequences for commitment to the law firm. We argue that trust, specifically in the form of perceived distributive justice, is created and nurtured through social integration among law firm members. Yet, for women, who continue to be denied full access to these social networks and professional rewards, trust is undermined. Exclusion and emerging distrust prompt women to contemplate leaving their respective firms. This paper examines the bases of differential levels of trust and their impact on lawyers' intentions to leave practice.

Campaigns against domestic violence and projects designed to reform laws are increasingly part of the development initiatives undertaken in African nations. Such projects are subject to standard criticisms of development (e. g., its tendency to enhance the power of donors over recipients) and to more recent concerns raised by postcolonial feminist scholarship (e. g., its tendency to ignore how women's condition in developing nations emerges from relations between donors and recipients). Mindful of these criticisms, many gender and law reform projects begun in Tanzania in the 1990s were designed to foster egalitarian relations between donors and recipients as well as to change laws and legal practices with respect to domestic violence. In addition, many projects relied on interactive workshops to impart information about law reform while empowering local participants. This essay focuses on two domestic violence workshops held in Tanzania in 1998. Linguistic analysis is used to expose the multiple relations of power in these development initiatives. The article demonstrates that demands on the structure of interaction—that is, everyone must be encouraged to participate—can work against creating egalitarian relations and suggests that some challenges to reforming development lie at the level of linguistic interaction.